When director Steve McQueen and composer Hans Zimmer first worked together on “12 Years a Slave” back in 2013, they began a partnership that would yield some of the best work either artist had ever done. Their latest collaboration, “Blitz,” is their most formally adventurous and emotionally powerful film yet, a portrait of a young English boy on the run during World War II that places the audience firmly in the shoes of its main character through a seamless integration of McQueen’s subjective camera and Zimmer’s expressive score.
From the film’s opening sequence, in which Zimmer uses a cacophony of children’s recorders to convey a sense of chaos and confusion, to scenes of relative peace and camaraderie that required a completely different musical language, “Blitz” is characterized by music that goes both broad and deep. The soundscape of the film is incredibly varied, but each cue perfectly captures whatever emotion is most prevalent and significant at any given moment.
“I had this idea that children do not know how to cope with the horrors of war or the logical steps that lead to safety,” Zimmer told IndieWire. “And they feel huge emotions, vast terror, crippling fear. And I think one of the things we should try to make the audience, the grown-up audience experience these horrors that a child has. So I said I’m going to write a score for you [that] will never have a soundtrack album because nobody will want it. But it’ll be the truth. It will scare and terrify the grown-ups with dissonance and chaos and I’m going to commit to being as fearless and reckless as possible about the whole thing.”
Zimmer’s own perspective was informed by the fact that his mother faced hardships similar to those experienced by the mom played by Saoirse Ronan; when McQueen told Zimmer that scoring “Blitz” would help him relate to his mother, the composer quickly found this to be true. “My mother would tell me stories of what it was like to live — as a refugee from Germany — in a top-floor flat in Mayfair, with bombs dropping continuously around her,” Zimmer said. “I got a phone call from Steve and he goes, ‘Come watch a movie. You’ll understand your mother better.’ I watched it and, for the first time, they weren’t just stories. I truly experienced all of it.”
In the above exclusive video, McQueen and Zimmer discuss the nature of their collaboration and how they found an aural language to communicate the experience of children during wartime.
“Blitz” is currently streaming on Apple TV+
